Browne, Simone (2015) “Introduction” Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke UniversityPress).
Simone Browne's work sets an extremely important example of how we should be approaching studies of media, data, and/or surveillance. I'm not skilled enough to articulate the depth and richness of her argument here, but I think I can articulate at least a few important interventions she's making in the relevant scholarship.
I think the first general thing to point out in this work is that Browne is working against the idea of vision or ways of seeing as neutral, regardless of how technological those ways of seeing may be. Technological ways of seeing don't neutralize seeing because they are more "machine" than "human". Rather, these technological ways of seeing are rooted in a longer history of ways of seeing - ways which implicitly and explicitly ordered matter into particular hierarchies. Browne is specifically thinking through how these ways of seeing ordered blackness, and thus had a role in materializing race in specific ways.
In addition to this already very interesting research inquiry, Browne discusses other ways of seeing and being seen as a way of countering anti-black fields of vision. What I find so interesting about this discussion (at least just based on the introduction) is that she develops those counter-vision strategies through historicization as well.
Duarte, M.E. (25 February 2017) "Prismatic Interfaces: Making Room for Intersectional FeministApproaches in Interface Studies,"Imagining Intersectional Futures: Feminist Approaches in CSCW,CSCW 2017, Portland, Oregon.
I thoroughly appreciate this work's attempt to propose a complex approach to studies of interface. It smartly takes up conversations that think of interface beyond the strictly computational sense (I'm thinking of Wendy Chun at the moment). Interface, in these conversations, is meant to be understood as a means of mediating information - not just computational information, but also information about how we understand ourselves and our environments. Contrary to the usual, strictly computational understandings of interface, this more abstract and subjective approach to interface necessitates the complexity of the interface. These feminist, intersectional approaches to interface tend to speak doubly to studies of computation and studies of subjective experiences. This need to double speak is perhaps what makes it difficult to fully articulate the method of such an intersectional approach to interface studies, as evidenced by the broader calls within the article.
Nielsen, Lynn (2018) “30. Personas” The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.
On a critical note, I want to weigh in on the discussion of pros and cons of the persona method in interactivity design. I think the persona method has more generative potential for prototypes or products that are tailor made for specific communities. You would ideally construct personas based on an intimate knowledge and engagement with a particular community - this way, you wouldn't need to collect their data (particularly dangerous for vulnerable minority communities). For prototypes aimed at a larger audience, I can see the persona method as presenting issues similar to data aggregation (which I discussed in a previous post). Personas might be constructed based on largely generalized trends and ignore the deviations in the data - deviations that do represent to some extent the audience being addressed. On a less critical note, I just want to state that the comparison of personas and scenarios to a kind of roleplaying game got me waaaaayyyy too excited…
Critical and Collective Response to a thread started by Siva Vaidhyanathan
I am always grateful for collective responses like this that work to amplify silenced voices in academic writing. However, I'm also left to worry about exactly which identities can maintain such a massive collective response. It's great that a ton of women academics can gather and support each other - I'm sure that inspires a lot of female graduate students…but what about those of us who have to deal with more intersectional identities? What hope do we have of amassing similar waves of support and vocal amplification? There are other questions to think about as well, such as: to what extent do these lists allow for variance to be pronounced among its elements/participants? To what extent does the common denominator of such a list (ex. all contributors are women academics, or all contributors are people of colors, etc.) flatten the subjectivities of the contributors?
FemTechNet Manifesto: Text and Audio
I really like that this manifesto aims to recognize various kinds of knowledge as legitimate. The manifesto may even be trying to challenge the concept of "legitimate" versus "illegitimate" knowledge altogether. I think the accompaniment of the audio file with the manifesto really works to emphasize the strength and acceptance of different kinds of knowledges (visual and aural knowledge). Part of me feels that this manifest reads as a list that could (and probably should) keep going on to account for the diversity of its participants. That might make the manifesto far less manageable, but predictably, the manifesto forecloses desires of manageability.
VJ Um Amel (2017) Ten Year Manifesto
Strangely, I've never thought of manifestos as being so intimately tied to embodiment. I've always imagined/interacted with them as collective works, not always thinking about the complex meshes the make up the underlying bodies. This manifesto provides an interesting insight into thinking about declarations of ways of being, or praxis. Articulating these ways of being become complex not only in the ways that you must articulate yourself while also pointing to the ways that the world articulates you - you also need to produce these articulations without reproducing the violences of limiting and ordering different subjectivities.